Month: October 2007

A new type of letter from Mr Wyndham, attached to the normal set, someone who has contacted me has received the following:

STATEMENT

I have prepared this statement to answer most of the usual questions that I am asked, when delivering my letters.

I have been distributing my letters since 1994, throughout Scotland, England and Wales. When I began, I thought that the difficulties, to which I draw your attention, would be resolved within a few years and that as a result, all of the jobless would have livings again. I still believe that soon there will be livings for all.

As I find more to say about it all, I have to return to towns that I have already delivered earlier letters to, with new letters. As I now have much less money than before, I cannot revisit in every year.

I now spend less per town delivery, than I did at first. Typically , I expect to spend each year, £600 on materiel and £500 on each of two trips. I continue to send letters via Royal Mail to remote addresses.

What I stress in these letters is that I produced ideas over nearly 50 years that have brought many revolutions to the ways we work, live and think. This new enlightenment has brought prosperity occupation and recreation that our grandparents could not even have dreamt of. What I say now, is that we all must participate in this prospecting for ideas for new products, services, management and government. I also stress that we all must have our livings protected from displacement by new ways.

Last night I entered a list of podcasts I listen to into delicious. I’m going to try later to turn the full list into an OPML file, so they can be loaded into a podcatcher or indeed into the Podcasting app on the Nokia N95 if you want. They’re a good mix, obviously leaning towards tech, but if nothing else you’ll get some new shows to try.

When I heard about Wil Harris and his Channelflip network, I had to check them out. Wil is based here in Oxford, and looks like he is trying to replicate the sort of video podcast offerings that Revision 3 have, but from a UK point of view. Which is fine with me, nowt wrong with getting some more British accents into the podcast world.

Channelflip has three offerings at present, Unwired, a tech show presented by Wil, Play:Digital, a gaming show, and Discus, a DVD review show.

I did hit a slight issue trying to get subscribed to these shows on the Nokia N95, the issue being that none of the stated feeds worked for me. However I had a sudden flash of inspiration, and realised that I needed the iTunes feed, but needed to open it without the itpc protocol that the URLs for those feeds use. So I copied those, put http at the start instead, and they all worked for me in the Nokia Video player app. If you want to do this yourself, the links are:

I’ve started building up a list of video podcasts which work directly in the Nokia N95’s Internet Video application over on del.icio.us. Only two so far, but I’m trying out a couple of feeds an evening to see if they work. Keep checking back!

Well I’d just finished writing the previous post, just went to flick through my feeds, and found this little gem. Google Maps is going Social. They’ve now added a profile section to Google Maps, so that any maps you chose to share will also now have your profile attached to them. I checked this out, and sure enough, I’ve already got my avatar and website in there already, from some other Google service I’ve used.

It’s very likely this is going to slip into the Google Apps family over the next few months. I suspect that it would go nicely into Gmail, so that you could find out more about anyone who mails you from a Gmail account.

This is going to be Facebook by stealth. Rather than a launch of a rival, they will add the profiles in. Rather than adding apps to a social networking app, they add the social networking to their existing apps. Google has Google Groups (formerly known as Usenet, in a way). They’re even a step ahead of Facebook by having IM and voice chat in place too. It’s starting to fall into place.

It took me quite a while after my recent holiday to catch up on my RSS feeds (I had a mere 7500 posts to work through, with more coming in all the time), so I had to be quite careful not to miss things of interest to me over the past few weeks. And there has been a lot in the area I write about here.

The Google phone has been intriguing for several months now. It sounded like an odd idea, and quite brave. The initial idea, as it was put forward by many news sources, was that it would be Google’s own phone, with it’s own OS and applications. It’s one thing for say Apple to move into the mobile phone arena, there are a lot of complications compared to other areas of hardware, it’s quite another for a company like Google who of course have the money to tackle the problems, but just haven’t operated in such a field before. A fair comparison may have been to Microsoft with the original Xbox. They got a lot wrong before they got a lot right (I’m slightly regretting giving mine away, as I have got a fondness for it, but then it went to a good home, so I’m fine about it really).

However, the New York Times broke some new details about Google’s plans. They suggest it is not a phone, but a phone OS. It will be built on Linux, be designed as a competitor to Symbian and Windows Mobile, and will be licensed for free to phone manufacturers. Now this sounds a lot more interesting to me. For one, it seems like the idea would be to get it on as many manufacturers phones as possible.

Further reading and speculation throughout the tech news blogs suggests it might even not be an OS, but an application designed to run on the major mobile platforms as if it were the phone’s OS, just wrapping together existing Google mobile apps with some new functionality. This seems like the most sensible suggestion yet to me, and mirrors the work they’ve done on the desktop. You can now use a whole suite of applications within the browser already on Mac, Linux and Windows, which is what I do at the moment. They just move onto the mobile platforms with similar, optimised for mobiles. Not such a huge leap, but instantly moving onto many mobiles at once, and doing the important jobs for them of having their applications used wherever their users are, and also pushing adverts to them.

Changing tack slightly (I’ll be coming back to that), the next day Mozilla announced they are working on a version of Firefox for mobiles. I’ve been crying out for this, I do like Opera Mini, but I’ve used Firefox for a good few years on the desktop, and it just works for me. I like being able to add in functionality to the browser as I need it, and see the best of that functionality rolled into the browser itself over time. Mozilla aren’t committing to any particular phone OS at the moment, but there has to be a really strong possibility it will be on both Windows Mobile and Symbian. They are promising extensions, built in the same way as the main version.

Now again, a lot of speculation about this in the tech news world. It does seem remarkably close to the news about Google’s plans for mobiles, Firefox is the favoured browser of Google (they bundle it with Google Desktop, with the Google Toolbar installed and also produce a few very useful extensions for it). So the suggestions are that both projects could be in some way linked, or at least will end up being complimentary in some fashion. A Google OS for mobiles will need a browser in some manner, and one would expect that if this was going to be written by Google themselves, they would have already shown off a desktop version. They haven’t, they seem very happy with Firefox as is.

Google have been rumoured for many years to be working on their own desktop OS. Usually a form of Linux, containing all their applications as the installed software. As with the Google browser, this has never materialised. Instead, they have slowly trickled out a series of apps within the browser, until now you have a wide-ranging set you can use individually, or set up in conjunction with a set of desktop based apps you can download in a bundle with third-party software such as Firefox and Adobe Reader.

Since the two announcements I described earlier, there has been a steady stream of updates to the existing Google mobile apps, and the launch of new ones as well. There was the 1.5 release of the Google Mail app, the launch of Google Calendar optimised for mobiles, the new Google Maps application, and today a new mobile version of Google Docs. All this leads me to believe that we aren’t really waiting for Google Mobile OS after all. We’re getting it now, just like we did with the dripfeed of Google applications on the desktop. In time, we may get a bundle of everything in one unified interface, but all the main elements seem to be dropping into place right now.

One of the reasons I think this is a good thing is the usability of Google products. Sometimes it can be very frustrating using Symbian, it can seem like it was designed by someone who just loves clicking dialogue buttons, and typing extra characters much more that I do. Why do I have to type "http://" so much? Where is the cut and paste? Why can’t I move information between applications? I’m not suggesting Google Mobile will solve everything, but one of the first signs I have seen is in the new version of Google Mail, where although the app is designed to do email, I can go into my contacts, and call them directly (if I’ve put their phone number in). That’s the start of the sort of functionality and usability I want on my mobile. It’s going to be very interesting to see where this all goes in the next few months.

I’ve just been getting back into the swing of things after the holiday, and yes, I admit it, have been too lazy to write up the rest of New York. I will try and do it at some stage, it was just that we were busy relaxing and having fun, and I just felt like disconnecting properly after the first few days, so I did. Still very relaxed from it all. But I shouldn’t use that as an excuse not to write, so I will start up again.

Small tip today, I found this the other day, and it’s very handy to have FTP folders set up, rather than use a separate FTP program. Just saves on a few clicks here and there.

To set this up in Kubuntu, go to System Menu > Remote Places, then click on Add a Network Folder. You then get a dialogue where you can choose the type of ftp folder you want. You can choose from Webfolder (Webdav), FTP, Microsoft Windows network drive, secure shell (SSH) or recent connections. It’s pretty useful. Pick FTP, enter your settings and click on Save and Connect. You’ll be prompted for your password, which you can choose to save, and then you’re done, and have a permanent connection you can now connect to from the Remote Places folder.

So I’m on a quest to get, well, everything on everything. I want everything in sync. Now that’s quite a project, so I’m taking little steps. What I’ve done today is to get my Gmail contacts to sync with my desktop contacts app, Kontact (in Kubuntu). I do all my email in Gmail, so it makes sense to me that I have that as the base point. I thought that if I could get my contacts onto the desktop, then I’ve got a place to then figure out how to get them onto my N95 later on.

What I used was a rather nifty piece of software called GCALDaemon. What this is designed to do is to sync Google Contacts and Google Calendars to, well, pretty much most things you can think of. And it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux (as it’s Java-based). Follow the detailed instructions, and then you can have both sync’d. I’ve got it working nicely fairly quickly. The only thing I can’t do yet, rather embarrassingly, is get the Daemon itself to run automatically on login. I’m going to hassle someone to help me out with this.

One gotcha is to make sure you are running Java 1.5 or higher as your default Java JRE, I missed this first time round.

I’m starting to experiment a bit more with what my Nokia N95 can do. I had installed Fring on my old phone a while back, but not really used it too much out of worries about cost. Fring is an instant messaging application for mobiles, which allows you to use MSN, GTalk, and most usefully of all, Skype on your mobile. Now over 3G, as I say, I was worried about cost, and also for Skype I found the quality a bit lacking. However as I can use a wifi connection on the N95, it comes into it’s own a bit more. I spend the majority of my time at home or at work, in range of a connection, so most of the time I can have it turned on, which is how you want to run it. And also on the bus into London from Oxford (which I seem to end up on about once a month on average), which I’m looking forwards to trying out. Nice little moneysaver potentially.

Quite easy to set up, and it picked up all my contacts from the account I had before. I was also pleased to see it now has twitter, so I can update my status on that too. Impressed with it thus far. And in general with the N95, for one I was encouraged to see that for my normal usage of a phone (i.e. not that much in terms of phone calls, but the odd bit of messing about here and there) the battery life is more respectable that I thought. One charge in two days, and I have been messing about with it a lot. I do get the impression it drains faster on wifi, and I haven’t starting using it as a media player yet (need to get a decent memory card first). So far, glad I made the switch from the 6300.